So I moved across the floorboards, placing my feet in time with the footsteps of the man out there to give them sound cover, and stood behind the door.

He sounded heavy, a heavy man. If he were Boris Slavsky his footsteps would slow as he saw the door was halfway open. The 9mm in the drawer might not be his only weapon; if he had something on him he would draw it, seeing the door like this. I hoped it wasn't Slavsky out there: to take him would simply be an alternative to letting him take me, and it would undo everything I was here to do, even if I had him grilled, even if he talked. We needed him to go ahead with his plans for delivery: it was the only way we could hope to stop them.

A cricket was singing somewhere outside the building, and as I waited, listening to the footsteps, I saw a flickering against the wall over there in the gloom as a salamander came in through the open window, tracing a shadow across the plaster.

There was no mirror in the room. The man out there wouldn't know where I was — wouldn't know there was anyone here at all — until he came right through the doorway, and by that time I would see his hand with the gun in it, if he had one with him, and that was all I would need, this close, say three feet from my sword-hand to his wrist.

The footsteps weren't slowing, but he wasn't yet within five or six doors of this one, wouldn't have noticed from that distance and in the wan flickering light out there that this one was open.

He might of course make a dramatic Drug Enforcement Agency entrance, hitting the door wide open and going into the shooting stance and yelling freeze. If he did that I'd have to move, and very fast; it could even be a little dangerous if he began sweeping the gun from this angle, be a matter of half a second to work in, all I'd get.

Hadn't slowed, they hadn't slowed, the footsteps. And it's sometimes like this in the course of a given mission, where the whole outcome, success or failure, the executive's life or death, depends on something quite trivial: whether the opposition's vehicle is closing in at three kph or four at a max of ninety, whether the drop from a roof is too high to use without critical injury, whether the footsteps along a corridor in the heat of the night are slowing, or simply coming on at a steady pace.

Signal: The night hasn't gone well, but for what it's worth I've taken a prisoner. There'd be one of his bloody silences on the line. They think you don't feel anything, the directors in the field, when things go wrong.

If this was Slavsky coming it wouldn't be Gabrielle's fault; she had what the recruiting desk at the Bureau calls 'espion-like qualities,' an eye for shadows, reflections, artifice in a man's walk; an ear for echoes, footsteps, deception in a man's tone. Nothing of this was manifest in her; I simply recognized it as a mirror image — or I could never have asked her to help me with Slavsky.

Now they were slowing, the footsteps, as the man out there reached the door of his room, or noticed the door of this one, half open.

Slowing.

I relaxed my legs, let my right arm hang loose, shook the tension out of the fingers like shaking water off, watched the floor where his shadow would come when he reached the doorway, breathed deeply, slowly, let the nerves receive the automatic signals from the brain — that in a little while, perhaps in fifteen seconds, ten, the organism might be required to undertake action at maximum speed and with maximum force — let the understanding build in the autonomic nervous system that copious quantities of adrenalin might be needed at an instant's notice to fire the muscles, waiting, I was waiting now through the final count-down until suddenly the man was standing in the doorway, his shadow reaching across the floor.

I listened to his breathing.

'Tae mien nehna tii non te?'

Then the shadow of his arm moved, lifting, and I felt the rush of adrenalin come surging through the system as the mind took a millisecond to rehearse the action of the sword-hand swinging up, power-driven from the heel through the hip, the shoulder, the entire organism now taut as a drawn bow as the hand of the man moved to the door and he closed it and went on his way along the passage, a janitor, security guard, someone like that, finding a door open and closing it, a trivial function of his duties done.

It took me less than ten minutes more to find what I hoped I would find, and as I stood looking at it in the beam of the flashlight with the unused adrenalin still shaking the muscles and souring the mouth, I saw that here, yes, I had the specific information Pringle had asked me for at our first meeting at the airport in Phnom Penh: the objective for Salamander.

16: SHADOW

There was a smell of pigs in here.

'I was able,' Pringle said, 'to get through to London almost immediately after you telephoned.'

Presumably because traffic through the Australian satellite was less heavy at night. I'd phoned him from the hotel with the information as soon as I'd left Room 27, according to the book: the executive is to debrief anything of importance as soon as he can in case he's got at, and can't. I'd simply given him the position marked on the map I'd found in Slavsky's room: 12°3′N x 103°10′E. The rest wasn't major.

'What did Flockhart say?' I asked Pringle.

'That he would take immediate action.'

'What action?'

Pringle gave a slight shrug. 'I really can't say.'

'But do you know?'

I was feeling sour, which is typical in this bloody trade when you've brought home the product and dropped it proudly on the doormat like a freshly-killed rat; there's a sense of let-down, especially when things have been easy, and tonight's work had been so easy it worried me. You wonder if you've missed something, some little thing that's going to come back at you like a whiplash. Paranoia, yes, but tonight the adrenalin was still in the bloodstream and there was no kind of physical action I could take to disperse it — you try jogging athletically through the streets of Pouthisat, Cambodia, at ten o'clock at night and you'll be shot on sight by some zealous lad in the police or the army on the safe assumption that you've either stolen a watch or set a land-mine somewhere.

'No,' Pringle said evenly, 'I don't actually know what kind of action Control is going to take. He keeps me less informed than some might suppose, as a matter of principle.'

What he was telling me was that I was forgetting that the director in the field is also at risk during a given operation, and that the less information he has in his head the less the opposition can get out of it when they start work with the burning bamboo sticks under the nails and so on. I hadn't forgotten; I just thought our smooth Mr Pringle knew more than he was ready to tell me. That was all right, provided he'd got good reason, but I didn't know what it was.

I let it go. 'What's that awful smell of pigs in here?'

'I really can't say.'

His favourite answer to whatever you asked him, you put the penny in and out it came. It was stifling in this place; the power station was on overload again so the ceiling fan wasn't working, and all we had for light was a kerosene lamp. Pringle had told me the building belonged to a volunteer mine-clearing unit; he knew them and had asked for the key, and this was also from the book — the executive and his director in the field never use the same rendezvous location twice unless it's considered secure. This place wasn't much more than a big shed, with mine detectors stacked against the wall and pairs of huge padded protective boots as big as snow shoes lined up on the concrete floor. Someone had started everything off with a flair for record-keeping when they'd set up shop: there was a map of the town on the wall with big red blotches on it and a sprinkling of little green dots; it looked as if they'd made a red dot every time a mine had exploded, and there'd been so many that the dots had become blotches, mostly around schools, bus depots, temples, where the most feet could be expected to pass. The green dots presumably marked the places where mines had been detected and brought here for defusing, but there weren't enough to become blotches yet.